Chapter 72: The Corpse Smiles

Rain tapped against a window that had no business existing at the bottom of an abyss between worlds.

Li Jiwen stood on the steps of his own death.

The apartment was exactly as he had left it two lifetimes ago, cold noodles gone stiff in a plastic bowl, a wall calendar three years out of date, and the monitor’s blue glow washing over a body slumped in an office chair.

His body. His old Earth body, head tilted back against the chair, mouth open.

Then the corpse lifted its head and smiled at him.

"Well now," Li Jiwen said, because if he did not say something, something worse would come out instead. "Fellow Taoist, you’re sitting in my seat."

The corpse spoke, and the voice was his own, not similar, not close, but identical down to the small rasp he got when he talked too long without water.

"You’re late," it said. "Sit down. Finish the novel."

’That’s my voice,’ he thought, and his hands went cold in a way that had nothing to do with the black wind. ’It stole my voice before it stole anything else.’

’I know this trope,’ he thought. ’This is the evil mirror boss fight. In every story like this, step one is absolutely do not sit.’

On the screen, the unfinished manuscript scrolled by itself. Words crawled up the page, sentences he had never written, describing the room, the rain, and finally describing him.

Li Jiwen stood in the doorway, pale and thin, looking older than his death had left him.

"You wrote forty one Chapters," the corpse said warmly, in his voice, with his smile stretching wider than any human jaw should permit. "Your readers are still waiting."

"My readers can wait another eternity," Li Jiwen said. "Who are you?"

A flickering window torn open beside him. The System’s light stuttered like a dying candlewick.

[The host must n—]

[Queries regarding doors: REFUSED.]

"That answers nothing," Li Jiwen said. "Thanks as always for your tireless uselessness."

The corpse rose from the chair. It rose wrong, shoulders first, then hips, joints unfolding in an order that legs had never been designed to follow. The rain outside stopped mid drop, each bead hanging frozen like beads of glass against the window.

"Sit," the thing said again, and the invitation turned into command.

The single word came from everywhere now, from the walls, from the carpet, from the frozen rain. "Remember."

’There it is,’ he thought. ’Every hostile offer in history ends in remember or obey or consume. Authors have no imagination.’

Black wind stirred inside his chest, the wind that had poured into him when the first door opened. It coiled around his ribs like a cat making itself comfortable, and it leaned toward the corpse as if recognizing family.

The room turned again.

The hallway stretched like taffy as he sprinted down it, the exit doorway moved back ahead of him while the walls sprouted new doors, all of them copies of his own front door, all of them opening onto more copies of the same room stacked like pages.

His shoulder hit wallpaper and tore through it and found more wallpaper beneath. Somewhere behind him, bare feet slapped wet floorboards in the rhythm of something that had learned running yesterday and was very proud of itself.

He vaulted the kitchen counter and found the kitchen of his early childhood home instead, complete with his mother’s soup pot on a stove.

He did not look at the pot. He had an idea that if he looked, it would be warm.

’Novelist, remember your craft,’ he thought, boots hammering the boards. ’A false world runs on its premise. Attack the frame, not the picture.’

He spun, slid under a swiping arm whose fingers were too long, and skidded back across threshold after threshold until he planted both feet in the original doorway, the true frame, where paint peeled and the number 4 hung crooked on a nail.

Golden light gathered along his right arm. The authority of an Omniscient God was vast enough to crack realities, and he had been rationing it since the abyss woke.

He stopped rationing.

The footsteps stopped, too. The thing stood at the end of the hall, head cocked, patient as a fisherman.

"You cannot finish it alone," it said kindly, in his own exhausted writer’s cadence. "Neither could I."

"Fellow Taoist," he said politely to the grinning thing shambling toward him through a hallway made of his life, "the story ends here. One star. Would not be haunted again."

He hammered his palm into the doorframe.

The blow carried no technique name, because what filled it was authority raw and unshaped, the jurisdiction to know a thing so completely that lesser realities apologized for being wrong.

The frame screamed. Cracks spiderwebbed outward through the air itself, through the frozen rain, through the ceiling, through the smiling face.

The memory collapsed like wet paper folding inward. Walls became sheets became shreds became drifting ash with a view behind it, the White Prison’s endless pale floor, thousands of sealed doors stretching to a horizon without sky.

Li Jiwen pitched forward out of the dying doorway and would have kissed the marble.

Something caught him. A hand, small and bloodless, steadying his shoulder with impossible gentleness. The faceless white figure stood beside him, featureless head tilted, bearing up his weight as if he weighed nothing at all.

Behind them, the last copy of the Earth apartment folded down into a single sagging sheet, and then into darkness pooling inside a half open door.

Black mist seeped around its edges like smoke refusing to commit to fire. And in the seams of that darkness, faint but patient, a smile remained.

Its voice drifted out across the prison floor, wearing Li Jiwen’s voice like stolen clothing.

"You were chosen to remember." A pause, almost fond. "I was chosen to be remembered."

The light died in the gap. The door hung open. No one closed it.

Ding!

[Status update: host has suffered conceptual contamination (black wind, dormant).]

[Recovery: unknown. Compensation offered regardless, per policy: One (1) Blanket, Winter Standard.]

"A blanket," Li Jiwen wheezed. "I fought my own corpse and you’re compensating me a blanket."

[Fairness matters.]

Before he could reply, the temperature of the entire White Prison dropped.

Baal’s voice rolled across the endless floor, exhausted and enormous, shaking dust from the horizon of doors.

"That door was not meant to be opened."

And beneath his voice came a sound like ten thousand teeth beginning to grind, every door on the pale floor, near and far, rattling on its hinges at once.